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No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

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Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#661

Post by gunsch »

schwartzworld wrote: post #502
jml7c5 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird problem with the language. Despite many attempts, with proposals like "xe" and "thon"[0], English never picked up a good gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. [Yeesh, that's a mouthful of adjectives.] As recently as 15 years ago, using "they" to refer to a single individual was derided by many as grammatically incorrect. It was common in colloquial speech, but frowned upon in writing, mostly beca…

> singular "they" is ambiguous Isn't ambiguity the point of using such a pronoun? I'm curious what the 'recommended' strategy was for situations where gender was unknown. "Someone robbed me; he or she took my wallet"?

You're right that it's ambiguous with respect to gender, and that _is_ the point.

However, it's _also_ ambiguous with respect to quantity of people it refers to (singular or multiple), i.e. the "Sally and her friends" example. Does "they" refer to Sally, or the whole group? Having a a separate "singular-they" word available would disambiguate.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#662

Post by fierarul »

runawaybottle wrote: post #571
jgilias wrote: post #163

So you've made something cool and it's time to release it. These seem to be the options at hand: 1. Release under a permissive license (MIT, BSD) and: - Have everyone and their grandma use it. - Die poor 2. Release under a copyleft license (GPL) and: - No company is going to use or contribute to it, unless they can somehow clearly separate it from what they see as their intellectual property. Or just hide it where no…

This is a interesting topic because it exposes one of the great sins developers commit - we don’t pay each other. I’m not talking about nickel and dimeing your fraternity, but there is certainly a reasonable price for a lot of these packages and plug-ins we install that can create financial autonomy for a lot of people via modest efforts.

Developers are the toughest customers because we all think: "that's just a small script and a cron job" done in a weekend and basically worth $0. All the while staying each day in a meeting costing a cumulative $xx(x) just to announce what the job for today is.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#663

Post by [deleted] »

donmcronald wrote: post #540
bovermyer wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the mainstream internet is the nasty place. The "old" Internet is still out there, at places like https://tilde.town .

I would like the spirit of the old internet with modern graphics. I don't understand why sites like that need to look like they're from the 90s.

[deleted]

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#664

Post by vmception »

cmiles74 wrote: post #536
vmception wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it is also hilarious when the contributors of free open source software rage quit when they realize others can use their work for free while the contributors forget to make money. Software developers, man! For a bi-weekly hilarious rage quit, check out Andre Conje on twitter!

I'm not sure that's the case here. It sounds like their apartment caught fire and now they are homeless. In my opinion, this sounds more like a desperation move than anger; this developer really needs money ASAP in order to keep a roof over their head.

Yeah.

And this other time I saw a hardware company be “in the spirit of open source” and then saw another company use their code in cheaper hardware sold for less and then the first company went on a rage tirade and tried to edit their commit history to change the license, tarnishing themselves in their whole community and customer’s eyes at the time.

FOSS rage quits are hilarious.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#665

Post by [deleted] »

matlock wrote: post #73
echelon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify You don't own the music. You can't share it, use your own software to analyze, shuffle, remix it, etc. > Netflix subscription But now there's Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Peacock Premium, etc. Except now instead of one easy to use interface to access it all, it's spread out all over the place and inconsistent as hell. And more expensive!

> You don't own the music. You can't share it, use your own software to analyze, shuffle, remix it, etc I'm a consumer of music, not a creator so I don't care that I don't own it. There are tons of ways creators can analyze, shuffle, remix or do whatever with it, but as a pure consumer Spotify is simply much better for me than CDs. I never cared about owning Music, CDs were always just a transport Medium so I can lis…

[deleted]

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#666

Post by dang »

ganafagol wrote: post #39
gkoberger wrote: post #31

I think this is fair for him to do, and well within his rights. He’s clearly frustrated. I wish there was a better way for open source projects to solicit donations. It’s hard to get your boss to pay for software; it’s extra hard when you get no additional value. I feel like open source would have more luck if Issues could have attached bounties. I may not think to donate to faker.js, however as someone with access t…

Please stop painting open source as a donation-based development model. That's completely distorting what it is about.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Your comment would be better for conversation if it explained more instead of just denouncing what you think is wrong.)

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#667

Post by fierarul »

watwut wrote: post #599
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Open source is a niche. The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. If they do, it’s simple bug fixes that they need for their paid jobs. The number of people creating and releasing significant open source projects is vanishingly small relative to the entire pool of developers. I think it was a mistake to tell entry-leve…

Significant part of open source development is paid for by companies. I don't know why the myth of its being done mostly for free persists, but maybe we should stop pretending it.

Depends on how you define "part". Maybe the visible part like MySQL or the Linux kernel or Android. But I'd say open source has a long tail mostly unpaid. From where I'm staying there is also a myth that companies pay for all the open source I use.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#668

Post by dang »

lollmao wrote: post #189

Unrelated, but why do people prefer to assume gender over just using gender-neutral pronouns? Not a native English speaker but I've seen this a lot, especially on HN even when there's no indication of subject's gender whatsoever. Or is it just weird to use they/them? Thanks

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032276.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#669

Post by cwyers »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #467
arthurcolle wrote: post #102

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

For all those people in this thread praising his work, now's the time to put your money where the mouth is. If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate. Asking irrelevant questions like whether he has a job does not help the situation. The community's response to events like this is what determines the future of open source. People like to complain about copyleft vs libre licenses. But if you hav…

> If you have used his work, push your companies to sponsor/donate.

That's not how any of this works. Most people work for companies that do not just donate to random software developers. If you want companies to send you money, you need to have something on an invoice. You don't actually have to make the commercial edition different than your community edition, especially if you're charging a low amount, finance isn't going to grill you about why you aren't using the free version. But you need to align how you expect to get paid with how companies are set up to pay people. Charge for stuff!

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#670

Post by fierarul »

kome wrote: post #151
Fordec wrote: post #52

I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Years ago software was fully build on the backs of a multitude of giants within their niche domain. But for a while now large companies have been adopting a model of taking from open source contributions and raking in billions. The original social bargain of "pay it on" has been broken by the Bezos of the world raking in billions. And yes, as o…

"I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately." it's open source vs. free software open source = free labor for private profits.

It's as if open source was invented to make part of free software more palatable to corporations.
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